More Than A Blimp In Time

OK, so it looks a lot like the old blimp. In fact, it looks a lot like the last 300 or so Goodyear Blimps going back to 1925.

It's supposed to.

The Ohio tire company's droning, floating, smile-generating flying machine might just be the most recognized advertising symbol in (or over) America. You don't have to buy anything, read anything or even watch television to find yourself staring, pointing and grinning like a kid.

There hasn't been much grinning around Goodyear's winter air base in Pompano Beach since August, when the blimp went limp in a summer swing through the northeast. A sudden gust threw the Stars & Stripes against the mooring mast just after it landed at Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The helium-filled envelope ripped open, and the blimp crumpled onto one side.

No one was seriously hurt, but the 3-year-old blimp was ruined. A 19-member Florida crew has been in a frenzy since, mating salvageable parts with new ones. Goodyear won't say what the project cost. Each blimp is worth about $5 million.

The payoff is that some 60 million people a year fix their eyes on the message: GOODYEAR #1 IN TIRES.

Goodyear's bulbous, bobbing billboards have been fixtures in South Florida's winter sky for more than 70 years. The renewed Stars & Stripes should be hanging around here for at least the next decade. Here are the uninflated facts on some of its aerial antecedents:

Oh, the humanity: A German airship, the Graf Zeppelin, made 590 trans-Atlantic flights in the 1920s and '30s and flew more than 1 million miles without a hitch. The Zeppelin company's most famous airship was the Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg: It was about 800 feet long, just a bit shorter than the Titanic and four times the length of the current Goodyear Blimp. The Hindenburg was designed as a luxurious trans-oceanic passenger craft with a dining room and sleeping quarters. It held about 100 people and 6 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. The Hindenburg ruined the airship passenger business when it burned and crashed at a New Jersey airfield in 1937, killing 36 people. The Goodyear Blimp, built for a pilot and six passengers, is strictly a promotional vehicle. It's filled with harmless helium, like a child's balloon.

How can it be everywhere?: The World Cup, The Olympics, The Indianapolis 500, the Kentucky Derby. Wonder how the Goodyear Blimp can hover over so many events? Because the Goodyear Blimp is the Lassie of the air: There's more than one. There are three Goodyear Blimps in the U.S., two in Europe and one in South America. The U.S. fleet, based at airfields in Florida, California and Ohio, is identical in design. True blimpophiles can spot small differences in logos. Together, Goodyear's blimps cover more than 400,000 miles a year.

So much hot air: A British naval officer named A.D. Cunningham coined the word blimp in 1915 when he thumped the side of an airship and echoed the amusing sound: "Blimp." At least, that's what Goodyear and Webster's say. More boring sources say blimp is probably a corruption of the British military designation for World War I-era dirigibles: "Type B, limp."

Blimp? Dirigible? Zeppelin?: They're just different names for lighter-than-air ships; airships for short. Count Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich von Zeppelin helped finance and create the first German airship in 1900. The German Zeppelins and American airships of the 1920s and '30s were enormous and rigid, with internal metal frames to hold their shape. The modern blimp is basically a football-shaped balloon (called an envelope) with a cabin (called a gondola) and motors and propellers below. All airships are dirigibles, meaning they can be steered instead of just floating like a balloon. Though lower-case zeppelin is now used to distinguish the big, rigid ships, Goodyear pays tribute to its crafts' origins by designating all its blimp models GZ, which stands for Graf (or Count) Zeppelin.

Good year for an idea: The credit for getting Goodyear into the blimp business goes to Paul Litchfield, a sailing aficionado enraptured by the sight of an airship in Paris in 1910. Litchfield, who envisioned a fleet of airborne yachts, later became president and then chairman of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. The company's first advertising blimp, the Pilgrim, wobbled into the skies over Akron, Ohio, in 1925. The company's PR department was pumped up about the possibilities: The blimp landed on the roof of a downtown tire store to make a "delivery." The blimp hovered over crowds, "blimpcasting" music over a loudspeaker. In 1930, the blimp showed off its first lighted signboard, made of neon tubes. Neon gave way to 182 individual bulbs in 1947. The first animated sign debuted in 1966. Current blimps use 256-color, light-emitting diode screens similar to laptop computers.